


A Pleasant Sort of Debt

by Name1



Category: The Mandalorian (TV)
Genre: Beginnings, Boska, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Platonic Cuddling, that moment you question if that's all it is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-12
Updated: 2021-01-12
Packaged: 2021-03-17 00:54:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,539
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28716105
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Name1/pseuds/Name1
Summary: Koska saves Boba's ass and he finds the whole thing to be quite unacceptable.
Relationships: Boba Fett/Koska Reeves
Comments: 23
Kudos: 50





	A Pleasant Sort of Debt

**Author's Note:**

> This is unrelated to the follow up I am working on :) hope you enjoy it.

It was a mere chance that she happened to patch into the live video feed of the Imperial outpost just at the right time. She'd recognize that armor anywhere. Her shuttle hadn't been detected by the scanners, so she took a moment to watch him in his element. He was quite well known--his gravitas was obvious. She couldn't help but watch how he moved confidently with a blaster in both hands, picking off platoon after platoon. She was almost impressed. If he didn't have such a big mouth she might even respect him. He was a force to be reckoned with and his fighting style was both aggressive and efficient, as much as she hated to admit it. He looked as pleased as he could be making his way through those unlucky enough to face him head on, until an explosion shook the camera and it blacked out for a moment. When the dust settled and the image was clear enough to make out she saw him on the ground, unconscious but hopefully still alive. The blast had taken out everyone in the immediate vicinity so he was safe for the moment, but he wouldn't be when reinforcements came. Damnit. This was not the plan today. She landed her small two-person shuttle in the hanger and quickly made her way over to his form which was beginning to stir, only then noticing the large pool of blood growing on the floor around him. The fact that he was alive at all was only thanks for his armor. He had no great admiration for her, that much was clear, but that didn't matter now. She'd save his ass first and face his ire later.

  
He comes around as she gets an arm under his shoulders. She knows the instant he recognizes her by the long suffering sigh that escapes him. She's already managed to drag him around a corner to give them some cover in case a fresh wave of stormtroopers came their way. He grunts at her when she jostles him. He's fucking heavy. "This is unacceptable. Take me back there to die."

"For someone bleeding out you still talk a lot of shit. You're too old to be this dramatic."

"I'm not being saved by a little girl. I refuse." That idiot actually tried scooting back back around the corner.

She will not let him bait her. She grits her teeth. "This little girl is carrying you outta here by your stupid face if she has to." 

"There's no way you can carry me," he informs her plainly.

"Watch me, asshole," she sneers at him, though she's already breaking a sweat, "if you can keep conscious that is."

He's finding it harder to push her hands away--a development she takes full advantage of.  
She sees the gaping wound in his side for the first time. The shrapnel from the blast had missed the armor entirely and sliced open his belly on his left flank. Or maybe it had glanced off the armor and sliced him that way. It didn't really matter now.

Her stomach wasn't churning from the smell so his insides were likely unruptured, but he was still losing an alarming amount of blood. If she hadn't found him he would have certainly died there on the ground surrounded by enemies. He raised his good arm, but before she could chastise him for moving, he fired into a soldier that was right behind her, leaving a smoking hole in his chest. Okay, so he was good with a blaster. So was she. 

She rips off her gloves since they're the closest thing to a bandage she has and presses them against his side, but the blood is still freely flowing down in rivulets down over his pants. She presses harder until he cries out a pained obscenity, and that's how she knows that's hard enough to stop the flow of blood.

"Just let me die Reeves," he says. "You can say you tried if it helps you sleep at night."

She's hardly listening to him. His smart mouth can wait. "You can call me Koska since my hand is half inside your belly right now."

He actually turned his head to look right at her. "No use both of us dying here, Koska."

She wouldn't show how shaken she'd been at the use of her name. He must really be in a bad way. "You underestimate my stubbornness. Common mistake."

She gets a better grip under his arms and wrangles him to a kneeling position. "You have to help me here," she tries to convince him. "It's faster if we can make some of it walking before you pass out and I have to drag you."

He tries to move his legs but they're so heavy. He's tired. "I can't."

She has to get him moving. "Oh excuse me, I thought you were supposed to be strong," she says as condescendingly as she can muster, "but here you are letting a woman carry you like a baby."

He glares at her--she can feel it even through his helmet. "Angry yet?" she asks knowingly. "Good. Now move."

He grits his teeth and manages to stand.  
"I thought you're supposed to be nice to people who are dying."

"You're not dying. I told you," she snaps. "Pay attention."

His arm is slung over her shoulders but he actually lets his weight lean into her. Surprisingly, she's able to keep moving with the additional pounds of disagreeable and awkward bulk .

They're so close now. "We're almost there you stubborn bastard," she tells him to keep him alert, "just a few more yards."

"You don't know when to shut up," she hears him mutter, where their helmets are touching. He was half laying on her now. 

"I'll shut up when I get you onto a flat surface," she informs him.

"You're not my type." 

She snorted. At least he had enough mental faculties for jokes.

  
The last few dozen yards are mostly her dragging him to the shuttle with very little help from him. She lowers him to the floor of the cockpit none too gently so she can get them the hell out of there. She should cut away some of the fabric from his wound the first chance she gets so she can watch to make sure he's still breathing and clotting even a little, but she's a bit preoccupied. "Dank farrik!" she curses, as she reaches for her knife while she punches in the coordinates. She figured she could multitask, but her knife was gone. She had knelt down awkwardly to get him upright and it must have come loose. Shit. She loved that knife. 

"Why are you helping me?" she hears him mutter from the ground beside her. She thought he'd passed out, but apparently not. "According to your boss, I'm a disgrace to the armor."

"She's not my boss," she says evenly, "and not everything she says is right. Bo-Katan runs her mouth even more than I do." He can hear the affection behind her words when she talks about that spoiled bitch.

"You're a Mandalorian, so cut it with the sad story shit. We look after our own."

"So, I'm one more gun in your fight to reclaim Mandalore then?" he assumes confidently, like he's got her motives all figured out.

She sounds offended when she has to defend her decision not to let him bleed out. "I didn't save you to invoke a debt. You helped Djarin rescue that kid. You didn't deserve to die back there." Koska always had a soft spot for kids. Bo mocked her for it every chance she got. 

He grunts. He must have accepted her reasoning.  
She can't have him thinking she's soft. "You'll wish you had died when I clean that wound though."

"I hate owing you," he hisses unhappily, when she pushes him into a sitting position against the wall so she can start stripping his chest armor off him. 

"Just save my life and we're even," she says distractedly, like it's the easiest thing in the world.

"Just dinner won't cut it?"

"Depends on the dinner...."

  
.............

"I need to take this helmet off," she decides, but moves her hands slowly enough he could object if he wanted to. "You're not like Djarin right?"

"Take it off. It's fine," he tells her, "I'll never live this indignity down and it has nothing to do with the helmet." 

"You don't have to tell anyone your big bad manly ass was saved by a girl."

"Credit where it's due," he admits, but it was like it caused him physical pain to say it aloud. "You're stronger than you look."

She scoffs. "A compliment. Great. You must be dying. So much for a rematch."

"I'll give you that rematch one day, don't worry."

"Maybe when you can sit up on your own without falling over?"

The bacta makes a horrible sound as it works stitching him back together but he doesn't scream. She's either impressed or horrified and how much pain he's been though in his life to have a tolerance like this. 

She lets him sleep it off for a few hours as she checks on him periodically. When she hears him cursing to himself she knows he's awake again so she heads to the small kitchen tucked in the wall. She feeds him some instant soup when he's strong enough to sit up and she's sure his stomach isn't perforated.

"I don't need you to feed me like a baby," he complains, once it becomes apparent how this is going to work.

"Yes, you do." She's not mocking him--just stating a fact.

"You're getting off on this aren't you?"

She laughs. "Not quite. This doesn't do it for me." 

He refuses to open his mouth when she brings the spoon close the next time, so she hands him the spoon instead and waits. "Okay then. Go on....show me."

He can't get his arm to move like he wants it to, so he hands it back over. "Fuck you."

That earns him another smile. "I've heard that before and way more convincing too. Open your mouth." She puts the spoon in his mouth and when she withdraws it, he swallows. They develop a timed system that works surprisingly well. She wants to rub in his face but refrains. He feels miserable enough. See? They can work together when they have to. "Open."

"Bossy little shit."

She looks smug at the compliment as she continues until the bowl is empty.

  
...............

He gets a fever as the night marches on and she stays with him when he's sweaty but freezing and burning up at the same time. He doesn't fight or argue or tease her and she hates to admit his silence worries her more than his actual injury.

She finds a lone washcloth and uses it as a cool compress for his forehead. He was really burning up now. She wipes his forehead and temples and a drop of water runs down his face. She brushes it away from his cheek with her bare hand.

"Kosk--" he breathes out, still clearly out of it.  
His hand catches her wrist. He's delirious, but has surprisingly good aim for being so ill.  
"Don't stop."

She doesn't know if he can even hear her but she assures him anyway. "Okay, I won't. Go back to sleep." Her wrist was on fire from his fingers but it wasn't from the fever. The heat seared her skin until his hand finally fell away, but she kept her hand against his cheek long after it was necessary. He seemed to sleep easier like that.

"You've been sitting there all this time?" he asks groggily, and tries to sit up when the night cycle is only halfway over. He sounds a thousand times better already after some rest and his fever broke. 

"I checked the monitors, got something to eat and then came to check on your sorry corpse," she tells him. "Lie back down."

"You look terrible," he observes, as he gets a look at her face in the low light she's kept on so she could keep an eye on him.

"I'm fine," she insists.

  
"Just lie down, woman," he finds himself arguing. "I'm not dying in the next few hours."

Her reluctance is obvious, so he tells her like it is. "I'm not going to touch you or whatever you're afraid of."

"I'm not afraid," she argues. She was no coward and she really was tired. A few minutes couldn't hurt.

His body was so warm she could feel it though the space between them and she drifted off easier than she ever had in a shuttle before. He must have put the blanket over her at some point because when she woke up it was over legs and feet. She almost liked his presence even when he wasn't running his mouth--and maybe when was did too. She liked his voice and his quick wit and harmless teasing as well, if she was being honest. He never said anything truly harsh but could certainly use his words to cut deep if he truly wanted to. 

This quiet warmth at night was what she had been afraid of--not that he'd grope her or worse in her sleep, but that she'd enjoy not being alone. She'd been right. It was nice. At some point her socked feet had tangled with his and she didn't even try to pretend she minded. 

His wound was significantly better when they woke up the following morning and twenty-eight hours from now she'd rendezvous with his associate to get him back to his ship. He's more talkative during the day now and even stands to walk around some. She was surprised at the relief she felt that the idiot in front of her would be just fine.

  
Night cycle rolls around again and he makes himself comfortable on the floor, while complaining about being too old to sleep on a metal slab. The small bunk in the wall was definitely too small for him though and she felt guilty sleeping on something resembling a bed when he couldn't do the same so she made up her mind. "I'm sleeping here again, deal with it," she says, as she plops herself down next to him before he can answer. It wasn't really a question anyway.

He moved over to make room and didn't have anything assinine to say as she made herself comfortable beside him.  
  
"Tell me something about you," he says, when neither of them can manage to drift off. "Not that you're a bitch or that you don't care what anyone thinks, and not about the Nite Owls, but something else....."

She cringes at how that statement inadvertently stung. That was pretty much all there was to her. There wasn't much else....

"I'm allergic to grapes, I guess."

He laughed and she liked the way it reverberated around the small space. It was a rare sound but she liked it even more because of its scarcity. It felt like a treasure she wasn't aware she was looking for.

"What?" she asks, suspiciously, "not what you were expecting me to say?"

"Not quite." He was surprised--surprised she managed to surprise him. She hadn't been what he expected when she first stood up to him ready to throw down at a moment's notice and she certainly wasn't now.

"So, no wine then?" he asks.

"Not if I don't want to pay for it later."

  
"I'll get you a beer one day then," he says in passing, "pay off my debt."

She made an unimpressed sound in her nose. "Dinner's been downgraded to just a beer? Cheap ass."

He grumbled something in the dark but she only picked up a few words including, "high-maintenance woman."

"I can do a beer," she agrees. "Then we'll call it even."

It was easier to talk in the dark. Well, easy, if she ignored the intimacy of sharing a blanket and pillow. He was a compelling storyteller and terrible with small talk like she was, but they didn't find that much empty space to try to fill anyway. They talked about everything except the most obvious topics surrounding the mission to reclaim Mandalore. He was obviously more well-traveled than her and he even managed not to make an age joke when she said just that. They talked about the planets they'd both been to, before moving on to the ones that only one of them had laid eyes on. Some of the Core World planets had exquisite architecture and cultural celebrations, but she hadn't been out that way in years; hearing him talk about it made her want to find a reason to go out that way again. When was the last time she'd talked about art or music with someone before him? She couldn't even remember. 

He had a dry sense of humor that she felt drawn to the more she was on the receiving end of it and he didn't seem to loathe her presence as much as he claimed either. She'd almost admit in the solitude of her mind that they could even be friends one day, but that didn't seem quite right. She was friends with--or at least tolerated--numerous Mandalorians, but none of them made her feel this inexplicable warmth that made no sense given how far in deep space they were. 

She slept with her back to him and when he pressed up against her in the small space, she was almost disappointed in how chaste he kept his hands. He was so close she could feel the heat radiating off him but not close enough to calm down whatever was making her skin feel too tight for her body. His arm had wrapped over her side only once, but before she could enjoy it he had pulled it back like she had burned him.The cold cabin had never been as warm as it was right now. They must have shifted in the night because their positions had reversed by morning. She woke up with her face pressed into his back and her bent knees fitting into the backs of his. At his not-unagreeable mumble, she flattened her nose more into the space between his shoulder blades but he didn't seem to mind. 

He walks under his own power back to his ship that's docked with hers, thanks to that Shand woman he still travels with. Koska knows from experience she's competent and doesn't take any shit--a good combination.

"I'm looking forward to that rematch," he says last-minute, before the door closes and they part ways. 

"You shouldn't be looking forward to getting your ass kicked," she boasts.

"We'll see..."

  
It wasn't until hours later in her strangely quiet shuttle that she automatically grabbed for her knife to cut some spare cabling. She had reached halfway into the leather of her boot before she remembered it wouldn't be there--another casualty of that damn Imperial outpost. Surprisingly, her fingers felt something against her calf but the shape was all wrong, so she pulled it out to inspect it. His knife. That asshole slipped her his knife.

  
She idly wondered when she'd have a need to travel back out this way. She wasn't looking forward to it or anything--no one ever looks forward to the Outer Rim territories--but it would be a shame if she didn't return such a useful possession the next time she was passing through......

It was a mere chance that she happened to patch into the live video feed of the Imperial outpost just at the right time. She'd recognize that armor anywhere. Her shuttle hadn't been detected by the scanners, so she took a moment to watch him in his element. He was quite well known--his gravitas was obvious. She couldn't help but watch how he moved confidently with a blaster in both hands, picking off platoon after platoon. She was almost impressed. If he didn't have such a big mouth she might even respect him. He was a force to be reckoned with and his fighting style was both aggressive and efficient, as much as she hated to admit it. He looked as pleased as he could be making his way through those unlucky enough to face him head on, until an explosion shook the camera and it blacked out for a moment. When the dust settled and the image was clear enough to make out she saw him on the ground, unconscious but hopefully still alive. The blast had taken out everyone in the immediate vicinity so he was safe for the moment, but he wouldn't be when reinforcements came. _Damnit._ This was not the plan today. She landed her small two-person shuttle in the hanger and quickly made her way over to his form which was beginning to stir, only then noticing the large pool of blood growing on the floor around him. The fact that he was alive at all was only thanks for his armor. He had no great admiration for her, that much was clear, but that didn't matter now. She'd save his ass first and face his ire later.

He comes around as she gets an arm under his shoulders. She knows the instant he recognizes her by the long suffering sigh that escapes him. She's already managed to drag him around a corner to give them some cover in case a fresh wave of stormtroopers came their way. He grunts at her when she jostles him. _He's fucking heavy_. "This is unacceptable. Take me back there to die."

"For someone bleeding out you still talk a lot of shit. You're too old to be this dramatic."

"I'm not being saved by a little girl. I refuse." That idiot actually tried scooting back back around the corner.

 _She will not let him bait her._ She grits her teeth. "This _little girl_ is carrying you outta here by your stupid face if she has to." 

"There's no way you can carry me," he informs her plainly.

"Watch me, asshole," she sneers at him, though she's already breaking a sweat, "if you can keep conscious that is."

He's finding it harder to push her hands away--a development she takes full advantage of.

She sees the gaping wound in his side for the first time. The shrapnel from the blast had missed the armor entirely and sliced open his belly on his left flank. Or maybe it had glanced off the armor and sliced him that way. It didn't really matter now.

Her stomach wasn't churning from the smell so his insides were likely unruptured, but he was still losing an alarming amount of blood. If she hadn't found him he would have certainly died there on the ground surrounded by enemies. He raised his good arm, but before she could chastise him for moving, he fired into a soldier that was right behind her, leaving a smoking hole in his chest. _Okay, so he was good with a blaster. So was she._

She rips off her gloves since they're the closest thing to a bandage she has and presses them against his side, but the blood is still freely flowing down in rivulets down over his pants. She presses harder until he cries out a pained obscenity, and that's how she knows that's hard enough to stop the flow of blood.

"Just let me die Reeves," he says. "You can say you tried if it helps you sleep at night."

She's hardly listening to him. His smart mouth can wait. "You can call me Koska since my hand is half inside your belly right now."

He actually turned his head to look right at her. "No use both of us dying here, Koska."

She wouldn't show how shaken she'd been at the use of her name. He must really be in a bad way. "You underestimate my stubbornness. Common mistake."

She gets a better grip under his arms and wrangles him to a kneeling position. "You have to help me here," she tries to convince him. "It's faster if we can make some of it _walking_ before you pass out and I have to drag you."

He tries to move his legs but they're so heavy. _He's tired_. "I can't."

She has to get him moving. "Oh excuse me, I thought you were supposed to be strong," she says as condescendingly as she can muster, "but here you are letting a woman carry you like a baby."

He glares at her--she can feel it even through his helmet. "Angry yet?" she asks knowingly. "Good. Now move."

He grits his teeth and manages to stand.

"I thought you're supposed to be nice to people who are dying."

"You're not dying. I told you," she snaps. "Pay attention."

His arm is slung over her shoulders but he actually lets his weight lean into her. Surprisingly, she's able to keep moving with the additional pounds of disagreeable and awkward bulk .

They're so close now. "We're almost there you stubborn bastard," she tells him to keep him alert, "just a few more yards."

"You don't know when to shut up," she hears him mutter, where their helmets are touching. He was half laying on her now. 

"I'll shut up when I get you onto a flat surface," she informs him.

"You're not my type." 

She snorted. At least he had enough mental faculties for jokes.

The last few dozen yards are mostly her dragging him to the shuttle with very little help from him. She lowers him to the floor of the cockpit none too gently so she can get them the hell out of there. She should cut away some of the fabric from his wound the first chance she gets so she can watch to make sure he's still breathing and clotting even a little, but she's a bit preoccupied. "Dank farrik!" she curses, as she reaches for her knife while she punches in the coordinates. She figured she could multitask, but her knife was gone. She had knelt down awkwardly to get him upright and it must have come loose. Shit. She loved that knife. 

"Why are you helping me?" she hears him mutter from the ground beside her. She thought he'd passed out, but apparently not. "According to your boss, I'm a disgrace to the armor."

"She's not my boss," she says evenly, "and not everything she says is right. Bo-Katan runs her mouth even more than I do." He can hear the affection behind her words when she talks about that spoiled bitch.

"You're a Mandalorian, so cut it with the sad story shit. We look after our own."

"So, I'm one more gun in your fight to reclaim Mandalore then?" he assumes confidently, like he's got her motives all figured out.

She sounds offended when she has to defend her decision not to let him bleed out. "I didn't save you to invoke a debt. You helped Djarin rescue that kid. You didn't deserve to die back there." Koska always had a soft spot for kids. Bo mocked her for it every chance she got. 

He grunts. He must have accepted her reasoning.

She can't have him thinking she's soft. "You'll wish you had died when I clean that wound though."

"I hate owing you," he hisses unhappily, when she pushes him into a sitting position against the wall so she can start stripping his chest armor off him. 

"Just save my life and we're even," she says distractedly, like it's the easiest thing in the world.

 _"Just_ dinner won't cut it?"

"Depends on the dinner...."

.............

"I need to take this helmet off," she decides, but moves her hands slowly enough he could object if he wanted to. "You're not like Djarin right?"

"Take it off. It's fine," he tells her, "I'll never live this indignity down and it has nothing to do with the helmet." 

"You don't have to tell anyone your big bad manly ass was saved by a girl."

"Credit where it's due," he admits, but it was like it caused him physical pain to say it aloud. "You're stronger than you look."

She scoffs. "A compliment. Great. You must be dying. So much for a rematch."

"I'll give you that rematch one day, don't worry."

 _"Maybe_ when you can sit up on your own without falling over?"

The bacta makes a horrible sound as it works stitching him back together but he doesn't scream. She's either impressed or horrified and how much pain he's been though in his life to have a tolerance like this. 

She lets him sleep it off for a few hours as she checks on him periodically. When she hears him cursing to himself she knows he's awake again so she heads to the small kitchen tucked in the wall. She feeds him some instant soup when he's strong enough to sit up and she's sure his stomach isn't perforated.

"I don't need you to feed me like a baby," he complains, once it becomes apparent how this is going to work.

"Yes, you _do_." She's not mocking him--just stating a fact.

"You're getting off on this aren't you?"

She laughs. "Not quite. This doesn't do it for me." 

He refuses to open his mouth when she brings the spoon close the next time, so she hands him the spoon instead and waits. "Okay then. Go on....show me."

He can't get his arm to move like he wants it to, so he hands it back over. "Fuck you."

That earns him another smile. "I've heard that before and way more convincing too. Open your mouth." She puts the spoon in his mouth and when she withdraws it, he swallows. They develop a timed system that works surprisingly well. She wants to rub in his face but refrains. He feels miserable enough. _See? They can work together when they have to._ "Open."

"Bossy little shit."

She looks smug at the compliment as she continues until the bowl is empty.

...............

He gets a fever as the night marches on and she stays with him when he's sweaty but freezing and burning up at the same time. He doesn't fight or argue or tease her and she hates to admit his silence worries her more than his actual injury.

She finds a lone washcloth and uses it as a cool compress for his forehead. He was really burning up now. She wipes his forehead and temples and a drop of water runs down his face. She brushes it away from his cheek with her bare hand.

"Kosk--" he breathes out, still clearly out of it.

His hand catches her wrist. He's delirious, but has surprisingly good aim for being so ill.

"Don't stop."

She doesn't know if he can even hear her but she assures him anyway. "Okay, I won't. Go back to sleep." Her wrist was on fire from his fingers but it wasn't from the fever. The heat seared her skin until his hand finally fell away, but she kept her hand against his cheek long after it was necessary. He seemed to sleep easier like that.

"You've been sitting there all this time?" he asks groggily, and tries to sit up when the night cycle is only halfway over. He sounds a thousand times better already after some rest and his fever broke. 

"I checked the monitors, got something to eat, and then came to check on your sorry corpse," she tells him. "Lie back down."

"You look terrible," he observes, as he gets a look at her face in the low light she's kept on so she could keep an eye on him.

"I'm fine," she insists.

"Just lie down, woman," he finds himself arguing. "I'm not dying in the next few hours."

Her reluctance is obvious, so he tells her like it is. "I'm not going to touch you or whatever you're afraid of."

"I'm not afraid," she argues. She was no coward and she really _was_ tired. A few minutes couldn't hurt.

His body was so warm she could feel it though the space between them and she drifted off easier than she ever had in a shuttle before. He must have put the blanket over her at some point because when she woke up it was over legs and feet. She almost liked his presence even when he wasn't running his mouth--and maybe when was did too. She liked his voice and his quick wit and harmless teasing as well, if she was being honest. He never said anything truly harsh but could certainly use his words to cut deep if he truly wanted to. 

This quiet warmth at night was what she had been afraid of--not that he'd grope her or worse in her sleep, but that she'd enjoy not being alone. She'd been right. It was nice. At some point her socked feet had tangled with his and she didn't even try to pretend she minded. 

His wound was significantly better when they woke up the following morning and twenty-eight hours from now she'd rendezvous with his associate to get him back to his ship. He's more talkative during the day now and even stands to walk around some. She was surprised at the relief she felt that the idiot in front of her would be just fine.

Night cycle rolls around again and he makes himself comfortable on the floor, while complaining about being too old to sleep on a metal slab. The small bunk in the wall was definitely too small for him though and she felt guilty sleeping on something resembling a bed when he couldn't do the same so she made up her mind. "I'm sleeping here again, deal with it," she says, as she plops herself down next to him before he can answer. It wasn't really a question anyway.

He moved over to make room and didn't have anything asinine to say as she made herself comfortable beside him.

"Tell me something about you," he says, when neither of them can manage to drift off. "Not that you're a bitch or that you don't care what anyone thinks, and not about the Nite Owls, but something else....."

She cringes at how that statement inadvertently stung. That was pretty much all there was to her. There wasn't much else....

"I'm allergic to grapes, I guess."

He laughed and she liked the way it reverberated around the small space. It was a rare sound but she liked it even more because of its scarcity. It felt like a treasure she wasn't aware she was looking for.

"What?" she asks, suspiciously, "not what you were expecting me to say?"

"Not quite." He _was_ surprised--s _urprised_ she managed to surprise him. She hadn't been what he expected when she first stood up to him ready to throw down at a moment's notice and she certainly wasn't now.

"So, no wine then?" he asks.

"Not if I don't want to pay for it later."

"I'll get you a beer one day then," he says in passing, "pay off my debt."

She made an unimpressed sound in her nose. "Dinner's been downgraded to just a beer? Cheap ass."

He grumbled something in the dark but she only picked up a few words including, "high-maintenance woman."

"I can do a beer," she agrees. "Then we'll call it even."

It was easier to talk in the dark. Well, _easy,_ if she ignored the intimacy of sharing a blanket and pillow. He was a compelling storyteller and terrible with small talk like she was, but they didn't find that much empty space to try to fill anyway. They talked about everything except the most obvious topics surrounding the mission to reclaim Mandalore. He was obviously more well-traveled than her and he even managed not to make an age joke when she said just that. They talked about the planets they'd both been to, before moving on to the ones that only one of them had laid eyes on. Some of the Core World planets had exquisite architecture and cultural celebrations, but she hadn't been out that way in years; hearing him talk about it made her want to find a reason to go out that way again. When was the last time she'd talked about art or music with someone before him? She couldn't even remember. 

He had a dry sense of humor that she felt drawn to the more she was on the receiving end of it and he didn't seem to loathe her presence as much as he claimed either. She'd almost admit in the solitude of her mind that they could even be friends one day, but that didn't seem quite right. She was friends with-- _or at least tolerated--_ numerous Mandalorians, but none of them made her feel this inexplicable warmth that made no sense given how far in deep space they were. 

She slept with her back to him and when he pressed up against her in the small space, she was almost disappointed in how chaste he kept his hands. He was so close she could feel the heat radiating off him but not close enough to calm down whatever was making her skin feel too tight for her body. His arm had wrapped over her side only once, but before she could enjoy it he had pulled it back like she had burned him.The cold cabin had never been as warm as it was right now. They must have shifted in the night because their positions had reversed by morning. She woke up with her face pressed into his back and her bent knees fitting into the backs of his. At his not-unagreeable mumble, she flattened her nose more into the space between his shoulder blades but he didn't seem to mind. 

He walks under his own power back to his ship that's docked with hers, thanks to that Shand woman he still travels with. Koska knows from experience she's competent and doesn't take any shit--a good combination.

"I'm looking forward to that rematch," he says last-minute, before the door closes and they part ways. 

"You shouldn't be looking forward to getting your ass kicked," she boasts.

"We'll see..."

It wasn't until hours later in her strangely quiet shuttle that she automatically grabbed for her knife to cut some spare cabling. She had reached halfway into the leather of her boot before she remembered it wouldn't be there--another casualty of that damn Imperial outpost. Surprisingly, her fingers felt something against her calf but the shape was all wrong, so she pulled it out to inspect it. _His knife_. That asshole slipped her his knife.

She idly wondered when she'd have a need to travel back out this way. She wasn't looking forward to it or anything--no one ever _looks forward_ to the Outer Rim territories--but it would be a shame if she didn't return such a useful possession the next time she was passing through......

**Author's Note:**

> Love to hear from you ❤️


End file.
